(Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association
Convention, December, 2000.)

The prison looms today as a central feature of American society. Since 1976,
we have been building on average one prison every week. More than two million
Americans are now crammed into the nation's still overcrowded jails and
prisons. In fact, there are now about as many prisoners in America as there are
farmers. Over half of those incarcerated are people of color. More than four
million Americans, again mainly people of color, have been permanently
disenfranchised because of felony convictions, many under laws enacted
explicitly to prevent African-Americans from voting. (1) Studies have
shown that this disenfranchisement has had a significant impact on the outcome
of presidential and senate elections prior to 2000. (2) We need no
detailed studies to show the direct impact of this disenfranchisement on the
most recent national election. Prior to November 2000, one third of the
African-American men in Florida were convicted as felons and then stripped of
their right to vote, while thousands more were purged from the voting rolls as
alleged felons by fiat of a corporation hired by Governor Jeb Bush. If only a
small percentage of Florida's 204,000 disenfranchised male African-American
citizens (not to mention the other 200,000 disenfranchised ex-felons in
Florida) had been allowed to vote in 2000, even the U.S. Supreme Court could
not have installed George W. Bush as President of the United States.

As the prison has become ever more central to American society, oral and
written literature created by American prisoners and ex-prisoners has become
ever more vital to understanding its wider significance. One central theme
unifies the entire body of American prison literature, a theme that emerged
from African-American experience: Who are the real criminals? As Frederick
Douglass wrote in 1845 about the law-abiding citizens of America: "I could
regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left
their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange
land reduced us to slavery." A hundred and twenty five years later, George
Drumgold, writing from Comstock Prison, expressed a similar idea in this
couplet:

They say we're the criminals, a
threat to society
But in truth they stole us, so how can that be?

But there's a difference. Unlike Drumgold, Douglass did not have to be
convicted of a crime to be enslaved.

Prior to the Civil War, African-American slavery was not legitimized or
rationalized by any claim that the slaves were being punished for crimes. That
was to come next. The necessary legal transformation was effected in 1865 by
the very Amendment to the Constitution--Article 13--that abolished the old form
of slavery:

Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have
been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States . . . .

Article 13 actually wrote slavery into the
Constitution of the United States, but only for those people legally defined as
criminals. So America now had to transform the freed slaves into criminals--by
law and through culture.

Why? Because massive slave labor was needed for the plantations, coal mines,
lumber camps, railroad and road construction, and prison factories, where
during the Civil War white slaves produced equipment for the Union army.

The former slave states immediately devised legislation--the Black
Codes--branding almost every former slave as a criminal. These laws specified
that many vaguely defined acts--such as "mischief" and
"insulting gestures"--were crimes, but only if committed by a
"free negro." Mississippi's Vagrancy Act defined "all free
negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen" as criminals unless they
could furnish written proof of a job at the beginning of every year. (3)
"Having no visible means of support" was a crime being committed by
almost all the freed slaves. So was "loitering" (staying in the same
place) and "vagrancy" (wandering).

Many of the new convicts were leased. The convict lease system had a big
advantage for the enslavers: since they did not own the convicts, they lost
nothing by working them to death. For example, the death rate among
leased Alabama black convicts during just one year (1869) was 41 percent.
(4) Much of the railroad system throughout the South was built by
leased convicts, often packed in rolling iron cages moved from job to job,
working in such hellish conditions that their life expectancy rarely exceeded
two years. (5)

Besides leasing convicts, states expanded their own prison slavery. The
infrastructure of many southern states was built and maintained by convicts.
For example, aged African-American women convicts dug the campus of Georgia
State College, and prisoners as young as twelve worked in chain gangs to
maintain the streets of Atlanta. (6) Some states went into big business,
selling products of convict labor. Hence the vast state prison plantations
established in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, where
cotton picked by prisoners was manufactured into cloth by other prisoners in
prison cotton mills. These plantations dwarfed the largest cotton plantations
of the slave South in size, brutality--and profitability.

The old plantation slave songs now metamorphosed into the convict work songs
of the prison plantations, the forest-clearing and tunneling crews, the road
and track-laying gangs. The encoded hopes for liberation and mass escape
characteristic of the slave songs were now replaced by the grim desperation of
such widely sung convict songs as "Go Down Old Hannah," with its visions
of "a dead man, on every turn row," or hammer songs that turned the
beat of the work instrument into the beat of despair or hope for individual
escape. Another hope lay in some heroic existential triumph over the machine
and the bosses, as in "John Henry." But the most audacious figure was
the Black Bad Man, the criminal as hero. Singing songs such as "Po'
Laz'rus" thus itself became a form of rebellion against the white man's
law and order, suggesting a direct line from these songs to Gangsta Rap.

Scores of African-American convict artists then transmuted those collective
prison songs into individual works that shaped the blues tradition forming the
fountainhead of jazz, soul, rock, and rap--that is, the core of modern American
music--which has become the dominant music of the world.

The prison experience is explicit in many of the formative blues songs such
as "Penal Farm Blues," "Prison Bound," "Back in Jail
Again," "My Home Is a Prison," and the many different songs
entitled "Prison Blues," "Jailhouse Blues," and "Chain
Gang Blues." Many of the finest artists were prisoners and ex-prisoners:
Bukka White, Leroy Carr, Charley Patton, Cow Cow Davenport, Robert Pete
Williams, Texas Alexander, Son House, Willie Newbern, and of course Leadbelly,
Lightnin' Hopkins, whose ankles bore the scars of chain gang shackles, and
Billie Holiday, who was first jailed at the age of ten for resisting a sexual
assault.

From the 1860s until the mid 1960s, Black prison literature remained
predominantly oral. Unlike the period before the Civil War when prose
narratives by former slaves were widely published, African-American convicts
had few publishing avenues prior to the mid 1960s. Even one of the rare
exceptions--the great convict novelist Chester Himes--was forced into European
exile to gain access to publishers and an audience.

Meanwhile, however, written literature by white convicts had become
increasingly influential. Writers such as Jack London, Agnes Smedley, Kate
Richards O'Hare, Robert Burns, and Nelson Algren had given America terrifying
visions of itself from the bottom of its class pits. These two streams, Black
and white, oral and written, merged into an explosive torrent of prison
literature in the mid 1960s, signaled by the publication in 1965 of one of the
most influential books in American literature, The Autobiography of Malcolm
X.

The tidal wave of great literature--fiction, nonfiction, drama, and
poetry--that poured out of America's prisons from the mid 1960s to the mid
1970s did not emerge by chance. Tens of millions of Americans were being drawn
into the global struggle against colonialism and imperialism, a struggle that
swept into America in the urban rebellions that began in 1964 and culminated in
April 1968 with revolts in 125 U.S. cities the week after the murder of Martin
Luther King, Jr. A year earlier, King, himself a former prisoner, had declared
that in Vietnam our nation was fighting on "the wrong side of a global
revolution" and our government was now "the greatest purveyor of
violence in the world today." The radical voices from prison were now as
varied as George Jackson, Etheridge Knight, Iceberg Slim, Piri Thomas, Jack
Abbott, and Donald Goines.

In response came a ferocious repression of prison literature: Creative
writing courses and other prison educational programs were defunded. Congress
abolished Pell Grants for prisoners. "Son of Sam" laws outlawed
convicts earning money from their writings. (7) By 1984, every
journal devoted to publishing poetry and stories by prisoners was wiped out.

Amid this repression, the literature coming out of America's prisons today
is even more crucial, as writers like Jimmy Santiago Baca, Patricia McConnel,
Dannie Martin, Kathy Boudin, and Mumia Abu-Jamal reveal what our society is
becoming. American prison literature is now a defining feature of American
culture.

Once upon a time, before the late 1960s, the literature canonized in our
anthologies and the literature taught at all levels of American education, not
to mention the literature departments of most colleges and universities, were
all as white as the skeleton on the prow of the slave ship in Herman Melville's
Benito Cereno. And the literature of the ante-bellum United States was
being taught as though it were not the product of a society that revolved
around its most distinguishing institution: African-American slavery. In the
wake of those urban rebellions, racial integration began to penetrate
literature departments, anthologies, and the canon of American literature. No
enlightened person today would think of teaching exclusively white American
literature or--and this is a more critical point--teaching nineteenth-century
American literature without reference to slavery as its matrix. Just as slavery
was the central and distinguishing feature of American society before the Civil
War, the modern prison system, which was largely an American innovation, has
ever since the Civil War been evolving into a central institution of
contemporary America. Indeed, today the prison-industrial complex is a feature
that distinguishes American society from all other societies in the
twenty-first century. So if we teach modern American literature without
reference to the American prison and its literature, we are behaving like those
who failed to see, hear, or speak about slavery and its literature.

Notes

1. On the history of felony disenfranchisement laws, including
explicit expressions of the intent to prevent African-Americans from voting,
see Andrew L. Shapiro, "Challenging Criminal Disenfranchisement Under the
Voting Rights Act: A New Strategy," Yale Law Journal, 103 (1993), 537-566.

2. See Jamie Fellner and Marc Mauer, Losing the Vote: The Impact
of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States (Washington, DC: The
Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch, 1998) and Jeff Manza, Christopher
Uggen, and Marcus Britton, "The Truly Disfranchised: Felon Voting Rights
and American Politics," Working Paper, 2001.

3. David M. Oshinsky, "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman
Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press Paperbacks,
1997), 21. This book provides a marvelous history of how the penal system
was used to reenslave African-American people.

4. Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts for the State
of Alabama, cited in John G. Van Deusen, The Black Man in White America
(Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1938), 124.